“Yep. Gather round, little grasshoppers, and I will tell the strange tale.

I know it sounds like the reverse of a Quentin Taratino movie, but it is true: During World War II, the Army intentionally formed a unit chockablock withfascisti and their suspected sympathizers. What a sensible idea -- much better than kicking them out into society and losing track of them.

This is all discussed in the new issue of Army Lawyer, where Fred "Three Sticks" Borch has a fascinatingarticle about PFC Dale Maple, a brilliant young man who was born in San Diego in 1920 and who graduated from Harvard with honors but then, because he was bad, was found guilty of treason and sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead.

Young Maple spoke many languages. But his favorite, alas, was German. At Harvard he got kicked out of ROTC for being vocally pro-German when that just wasn't cool, according to a separate article on him that I just read. Stymied in his hopes to do post-graduate work in Berlin, which was busy with other things at the time, he enlisted in the Army in 1942. The Army had just the place for him: the 620th Engineer General Service Company, which despite its innocuous name was actually a holding unit for about 200 GIs of suspect loyalty, many of them German-born. The unit, which was not given weapons, was located in Camp Hale, Colorado, which is far from any port, but happened to next to an detachment of German PoWs on a work party.

And thereby hangs this tale. In February 1944 Private Maple decided it would be a good idea to help some hard-boiled eggs from the Afrika Korps escape to Mexico. Southward he drove them though New Mexico-a lovely drive, I've done much of it. Just across the international border, Mexican authorities caught them all and tossed them back. (Is there a derogatory term for people who illegally cross from the U.S. into Mexico, besides "stupid gringos"?) Maple was tried and found guilty and secretly sentenced to death. President Roosevelt clemently commuted his sentence to life, and he was released in 1951. Maple's claim to notoriety is that he was the first American-born GI ever found to have committed treason.

As best as I can tell from an internet search, Maple then moved back to San Diego and, like a Tom Waits song, went into the insurance business. He apparently died 10 years ago.”

-- No accordion fail, but pretty good nonetheless.

"Oranjemund, Namibia. It seems to be the largest diamond mine vehicle graveyard, and yet there are barely any pictures of it. Satellite photos of the area could let you guess how big it is. The mine owned by De Beers is reputed to have the largest private earthmoving fleet in the world.

From the texts I have found here and there, my understanding is that that people are not allowed to visit those the area for safety reasons, hence the lack of available photos."

“More than 50 years after the invention of the laser, scientists at Yale University have built the world's first anti-laser, in which incoming beams of light interfere with one another in such a way as to perfectly cancel each other out. The discovery could pave the way for a number of novel technologies with applications in everything from optical computing to radiology.

Conventional lasers, which were first invented in 1960, use a so-called "gain medium," usually a semiconductor like gallium arsenide, to produce a focused beam of coherent light -- light waves with the same frequency and amplitude that are in step with one another.

Last summer, Yale physicist A. Douglas Stone and his team published a study explaining the theory behind an anti-laser, demonstrating that such a device could be built using silicon, the most common semiconductor material. But it wasn't until now, after joining forces with the experimental group of his colleague Hui Cao, that the team actually built a functioning anti-laser, which they call a coherent perfect absorber (CPA).

The team, whose results appear in the Feb. 18 issue of the journal Science, focused two laser beams with a specific frequency into a cavity containing a silicon wafer that acted as a "loss medium." The wafer aligned the light waves in such a way that they became perfectly trapped, bouncing back and forth indefinitely until they were eventually absorbed and transformed into heat…”

M78 isn't really hiding in planet Earth's night sky. About 1,600 light-years away and nestled in the nebula rich constellation Orion, the large, bright, reflection nebula is well-known to telescopic skygazers. But this gorgeous image of M78 was selected as the winner of the Hidden Treasures 2010 astrophotography competition. Held by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the competition challenged amateur astronomers to process data from ESO's astronomical archive in search of cosmic gems. The winning entry shows off amazing details within bluish M78 (center) embraced in dark, dusty clouds, along with a smaller reflection nebula in the region, NGC 2071 (top). Yellowish and even more compact, the recently discovered, variable McNeil's Nebula is prominent in the scene below and right of center. Based on data from ESO's WFI camera and 2.2 meter telescope at La Silla, Chile, this image spans just over 0.5 degrees on the sky. That corresponds to 15 light-years at the estimated distance of M78.

“Colombia has announced it is negotiating with China to build an alternative to the Panama Canal.

The proposed transport route is intended to promote the flow of goods between Asia and Latin America.

The plan is to create a "dry canal" where the Pacific port of Buenaventura would be linked by rail, across Colombia, to the Atlantic Coast.

Trade between Colombia and China has increased from $10m in 1980 to more than $5bn last year.

The announcement came from the Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, who told the Financial Times that the project was "a real proposal... and it is quite advanced".

China has been increasing its involvement across Latin America to feed a growing need for raw materials and commodities.

According to BBC Bogota correspondent Jeremy McDermott, President Santos has departed from the emphasis on security of his predecessor Alvaro Uribe.

Mr Uribe's Democratic Security Policy, backed by US military aid, is credited with halving the numbers of Marxist rebels and pushing them into the more remote jungles and mountains.

Mr Santos is concentrating on what he calls "democratic prosperity", our correspondent says.

He hopes that economic development will address some of the root issues of the 46-year civil conflict, such as poverty and the lack of opportunities, which have pushed people into being rebels or into the lucrative drug trade, our correspondent says…”

-- Trade between Colombia and China has increased from $10m in 1980 to more than $5bn last year.

“The FBI urged members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security on Thursday to update the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) and make it easier for authorities to eavesdrop on Internet.

The act was passed in 1994 and requires telecommunication companies to design their equipment and services to ensure that law enforcement and national security officials can monitor telephone and other communications whenever necessary.

"Over the years, through interpretation of the statute by the Federal Communications Commission, the reach of CALEA has been expanded to include facilities-based broadband internet access and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services that are fully inter-connected with the public switched telephone network," FBI General Counsel Valeria Caproni told the subcommittee.

"Although that expansion of coverage has been extremely helpful, CALEA does not cover popular Internet-based communications modalities such as webmail, social networking sites or peer-to-peer services."

"As a result, although the government may obtain a court order authorizing the collection of certain communications, it often serves that order on a provider who does not have an obligation under CALEA to be prepared to execute it," she explained. "Such providers may not have intercept capabilities in place at the time that they receive the order."

The proposal to expand CALEA would require companies involved in online communications to re-engineer their software so that law enforcement could easily access it.

In October 2010, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration was drafting new regulations to make it easier for authorities to eavesdrop on Internet and e-mail communications…”

“The Colombian military has seized a 100-foot-long submarine capable of transporting eight tons of cocaine from Colombia to Mexico, news reports say.

The vessel was found in a jungle area in Timbiqui in southwestern Colombia on Sunday, according to a report from RTT News.

Colombian navy officials said the homemade sub had two diesel engines and sophisticated navigational equipment that would enable it to travel to Mexico while remaining up to 30 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

The vessel was set up for a crew of four but was unoccupied when found, RTT reported. Officials estimated it would have cost $2 million to build.

The submarine is just the latest example of crafts smugglers have made to try to get their illicit cargo past law enforcement.

Last year, VBS.TV got access to the Colombian naval base where many captured smuggling vessels are taken.”

-- It doesn't look very ocean worthy... Let alone 30ft under water.

“Thousands of young stars come to the fore in in this beautiful new image from the Spitzer Space Telescope.

The previously unseen stars were born around 1,800 light-years from Earth in a region called the North American Nebula. In images that capture the same range of light that human eyes can see, the nebula looks like the eastern seaboard of the United States, down to the Gulf of Mexico. But most of that light is reflected off clouds of dust that hide infant stars. Only about 200 young stars were known before.

This image breaks through the clouds to find more than 2,000 new objects that may be young stars. (More data processing will determine their nature.) Because Spitzer is sensitive to infrared wavelengths that can sense heat, it can see the glow of the dusty, buried stars.

“One of the things that makes me so excited about this image is how different it is from the visible image, and how much more we can see in the infrared than in the visible,” said Spitzer astronomer Luisa Rebullin a press release. “The Spitzer image reveals a wealth of detail about the dust and the young stars here.” A paper detailing the observations has been accepted in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

Stars are born inside collapsing balls of gas and dust, which flattens into a disk that spins together with the star like a record album. As the star ages, the disk is thought to congeal into planets. Most of the dust is expected to dissipate by the time the star is at the center of a mature solar system.

The new Spitzer image shows stars in all stages of development, from dust-blanketed infancy to early adulthood, when stars are new parents to a growing family of planets.

Despite the new views of its growing stellar family, the North American nebula is still shrouded in mystery. The group of massive stars that is thought to dominate the nebula is still unseen. The Spitzer image and images from other telescopes hint that the missing stars lurk behind the Gulf of Mexico portion of the nebula.

In this image, infrared light with a wavelength of 3.6 microns is colored blue; 8.0-micron light is green; and 24-micron light is red. Since taking this image, Spitzer ran out of the coolant needed to keep the two longest wavelength detectors working. Spitzer is still snapping photos in the two shorter wavelength bands.”

“Mathematicians are creating their own version of the periodic table that will provide a vast directory of all the possible shapes in the universe across three, four and five dimensions, linking shapes together in the same way as the periodic table links groups of chemical elements.

The three-year project should provide a resource that mathematicians, physicists and other scientists can use for calculations and research in a range of areas, including computer vision, number theory, and theoretical physics.

The researchers, from Imperial College London and institutions in Australia, Japan and Russia, are aiming to identify all the shapes across three, four and five dimensions that cannot be divided into other shapes.

As these building block shapes are revealed, the mathematicians will work out the equations that describe each shape and through this, they expect to develop a better understanding of the shapes' geometric properties and how different shapes are related to one another.

The work is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Society and the European Research Council.

Project leader Professor Alessio Corti, from the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London, explained: "The periodic table is one of the most important tools in chemistry. It lists the atoms from which everything else is made, and explains their chemical properties. Our work aims to do the same thing for three, four and five-dimensional shapes -- to create a directory that lists all the geometric building blocks and breaks down each one's properties using relatively simple equations. We think we may find vast numbers of these shapes, so you probably won't be able to stick our table on your wall, but we expect it to be a very useful tool…””

-- Wait… Are you telling me people didn't take an online poll seriously? I find that hard to believe.

“Here's a nerve-wracking notion. Let's say you have an illegal plant in your garden or even in your home. And let's presume this plant (because it's marijuana, or some genetically altered vegetable that's illegal in Europe) will get you in trouble if the police find out.

Now imagine that your local police have their own bees, bees they release each morning to scour the neighborhood looking for illegal plants.

Getting nervous? Now look at this interview with a man who appears to be some kind of London Police Inspector with their "Genetics Surveillance Unit":

This video was created by Thomas Thwaites. He calls it, "Policing Genes." In it, Mark Machan, identified as a Metropolitan Police Bee Keeper, explains how the police maintain 43 bee hives in South London and, "a little bit of [nearby] Kent," how these bees collect pollen in the neighborhood and then, being bees, they return to the hive to tell the other bees exactly where the good plants are. Bees give directions by performing a "waggle" dance.

The police, meanwhile, have developed software to read bee communications. As Mr. Machan explains, "There's a video camera in each hive. And what we're able to do is to decode that, to tell us where the location of the pollen is." In the video, a computer seems to lock onto the waggle dance and transmit decoding signals in green, red and blue…”

“Performance by Yang Zhichao

Location: Shanghai.

Time: November 5/ 2000.

Duration: 45 minutes.

Explanation: at 10:00 A.M. on November 5/2000, second floor of No.1133, Suzhou road Shanghai where "Fuck off" was on show, I made an operation platform with 200X80X78cm, an operational scalpel was incised into my left scapula by a surgeon. Without any anesthesia, the scalpel made 2 cuts with 1 centimeter deep and 1 centimeter wide. Afterwards, grass picked at the banks of Suzhou River was plant into the two cuts.”

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dmanlt.com has been online since 7.9.2010. It is a website about photography, science, art, technology, nature, culture, current events and everything in between and beyond. It is written and regularly updated by Donatas Urbonas.